For AMD Radeon customers using the open-source Linux graphics driver, the Linux 3.11 kernel is going to be mega exciting! Alex Deucher of AMD posted a set of 165 kernel patches today. Most notably, there's finally Dynamic Power Management (DPM) support for R600 GPUs up through Southern Islands hardware! Yes, there's finally dynamic power management in the open-source driver. Additionally, there's initial support for AMD "Sea Islands" hardware and there's also ASPM (Active State Power Management) support.

After the UVD code drop for providing open-source hardware-accelerated video support, the other feature many Radeon Linux users have been wanting (besides faster OpenGL performance) is dynamic power management. Right now there's only limited static power management and no dynamic re-clocking based upon load and other means. The Catalyst driver has supported dynamic power management via "PowerPlay" for years, but there's never been nice open-source GPU driver power management... Until today.